Ambassadors are your local anchors for Africa Code Week event orchestration, questions and support. Feel free to reach out to them to get started on hosting your own coding workshops or simply get introduced to other interested schools / organizations. They are here to help you engage as many children and youth as possible in your community!

Aphrodice MUTANGANA, social entrepreneur, kLab General Manager( www.klab.rw), a tech innovation space in Kigali, he Founder and Managing Director of FOYO Group Ltd, www.foyo.rw, a company that designed and developed Foyo M-health mobile application and www.napteker.com which is an African online systematic pharmaceutical directory that provides education and information to its users on important issues pertaining to drugs in Africa, such as dosage, drug & food interaction and side effect etc. Information on the platform is classified by country in the first phase, free of charge, focusing only on Africa, an interactive, user friendly platform.

Initiator of tech Support Incike initiative www.incike.rw , which is a mobile crowd funding that had been used to address one of the problems faced by a portion of survivors of the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi, locally known as “INCIKE”. These are people, whose family members were all decimated during the Genocide, and they are left all alone today and they are more than 70 years old. Initiator of idea, www.mutangana.rw , good idea for great entrepreneurs, people share business ideas, successful people with their strategic advice and more than 45 crowd funding online platform that will work as a source of startup capital which is a big issue in our developing countries.

Member of Global Shapers, Kigali Hub and Member of Private Sector Federation/ICT Chamber. Co-founder of WeareAfrican http://weareafrican.org/ an open online discussion forum platform where people from all the corners of the world can share ideas/homegrown solution of what has to be done in African countries.

Carolyne is a Mandela Washington Fellow, social entrepreneur and founder of Apps and Girls. This social enterprise is on a mission to bridge the tech gender gap in Africa by empowering girls aged 10-18 years with super powers (coding, engineering and entrepreneurship skills) so they become effective leaders and Tech drivers leveraging technology to solve challenges in their communities.

A Tigo & Reach for Change digital change maker, Carolyne was awarded a certificate of achievement in 2014 for her efforts towards improving children’s lives through innovation & digital technology at the Hackathon Prototype Change 2014 in Sweden. She also won the MalikiaWanguvu2017 award as well as the NextGen franchising 2017 award. Apps and Girls was awarded by UNDP and Sahara sparks for its devotion and persistence in supporting and inspiring Women in Technology across Tanzania.

Carolyne is now a mentor for several organizations, including First Global Robotics, Africa Entrepreneurship Award and Ushahuri virtual platform. Carolyne also serves as regional ambassador for the Techinnovation Challenge. Where can you meet her in 2017? At the 2017 e-learning Africa conference in Mauritius, where she will be speaking in a keynote rightfully titled: “An African Woman with the superpower of Code is a mighty sword for Africa.

Carolyne holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Information Systems.

Vickie co-leads HabeNerd, an online learning platform in Zimbabwe which provides organized and intense training on ICT skills and courses across all age and gender classes. With a goal to equip participants (locally and regionally) with programming and coding skills, the platform helps participants explore and kick start careers in ethical hacking and programming as well as to learn how applications are made and how to turn those into revenue.

HabeNerd has launched Coding Day initiatives with partners in Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Zambia. An ICT professional and trainer passionate about social entrepreneurship applied to technology, Vickie is also a member of the Computer Society of Zimbabwe Bulawayo Chapter, serving on the Executive and the Software Development Committee.

Through Africa Code Week, she hopes to "conscientise as many young Zimbabweans on the benefits of learning coding skills and broaden the scope of App development in Zimbabwe."

Director of Studies, Computer and Secretarial School, Speciss College Bulawayo

Zimbabwe

Speciss College Bulawayo is a private college that offers education and training in academics, business, ICT, garment construction and technical courses. Passionate about empowering youth with digital skills, Janet manages the training of professional and short ICT courses. She has been actively involved in the Technovation Challenge since 2015, where she was a judge at the final pitch in Bulawayo. In 2017, she mentored one of the teams of girls participating in the challenge, where they had to build a business plan and develop a mobile app that addressed a problem in the community.

Janet has also been the Chairperson for the Computer Society of Zimbabwe Bulawayo Chapter since April 2016. As an ambassador for Africa Code Week, her dream is to "empower digital-conversant Zimbabweans

Abdoulaye has been a tech lover since childhood. He grew up in Africa and moved to Belgium when he was nine. There, he had the chance to study computer science while getting involved with CoderDojo to empower youth from all over the globe with coding skills. His purpose is to share the passion for coding and give others the opportunity to grow through the understanding and ability to create technology.

My name is Jonathan Okorie and I love to code! I am a 12 year old in 6th grade at Glenwood Middle School, Maryland. I like to partake in hobbies such as researching in technology, playing basketball, drawing and animating. I have recently made a YouTube channel where I post my animations and drawings.

Two years ago, in fourth grade, my journey to coding began. My fascination in technology was the driving passion for this interest. Ever since I was very young, I had always played around and studied broken pieces of technology. Soon enough, I got to learn more about modern technology and how they worked. I then realized that to make them work required computer programming skills.

What is coding? Put simply, coding in a programming language of your choice such as SCRATCH is teaching the computer logical instructions and commands to execute tasks. I began with writing my first game using SCRATCH and I finished the game. Although it wasn’t a masterpiece, I was glad with the end product and made a better game. I also noticed how math and science was easier to understand.

I actually did not start coding for an educational purpose, but I did it because I thought it was fun.I am now learning other advanced coding languages such as C sharp and JAVA for the purpose of making video games, solving problems, and making software.

What are my goals? I really want to get an education in computer engineering and science. Although it will take me time and effort to be successful, but I am willing to put in the work for my future. In conclusion, we are the future, coding is the future. #stayNEON!